The Lightning Keeper by Starling Lawrence Page A

would Mr. Stephenson think if he knew that the real reason for this delay was that he could spend an indefinite amount of time with her in the claustrophobic intimacy of that antechamber where the ledgers were kept, so airless on these close days that they seemed at times to be inhaling each other?
    He had seen how the dark hair trembled when she shook her head in annoyance over the total of new purchases; had noted that the exertion of shifting the ledgers brought a flush to her face and even a beading of perspiration to her upper lip, which she dismissed with a brusque, mannish gesture; had felt desire as an emptiness, a void into which he might disappear at the suggestion of her breasts against the gray fabric when she reached to take an old account book down from the shelf; had taunted her with the impassivity of his eyes as he made her explain, not for the first time, how the price of Bigelow bar was determined, or the provision of charcoal balanced against the projected requirements. The walls pressed in upon them; the open door admitted air like a draft to their furnace; her father, a deaf sentry behind the turning of that post, coughed and muttered to himself, punctuating their silences.
    In the two weeks since he had driven her to Truscott’s house, Toma had watched her for some sign. Away from her office, he had no advantage at all, could compel nothing except polite inquiries or responses, seemed almost to vanish from her horizon. She had kissed him in thecarriage house, where the shadows reminded them both of the baths at Herculaneum. But in the light he was a different person: he saw it in her eyes, felt the distance between them like a garment, as shabby as his own, that could not be cast off.
    Fowler Truscott’s clothes had made an impression upon him. Mr. Stephenson had worn the same black frock coat to work every day, and while it was a clear sign of precedence and authority, he cared not if his sleeve brushed the idle gearing, and would take a sample or a piece of broken machinery upon his striped knee to have a better look at it. The ironmaster of Beecher’s Bridge wore a suit of shapeless black rusted with age and mended many times over. But Truscott’s flannels were the color of fresh butter, his open blue shirt set off the mottled carmine of silk around his neck, and the linen jacket, elegantly belted, hung as weightlessly from his shoulders as if it had been painted there. He himself had worn such finery once, and though his silken vest with its brilliant piping in no way resembled what Truscott wore, its gaudy uselessness, too, had been a kind of advertisement. When he had come around the rear of the car to open the door for Harriet, she did not seem aware of his presence, although she thanked him. She was looking at Truscott, who had thrown down his golf club and was crunching across the gravel to greet them, and in her expression he saw no pleasure or anticipation, but a kind of measuring calculation, as if she had just looked up from her ledger in a moment of abstraction.
    He estimated the wheel to be over ten meters in diameter, the sort of behemoth that he had read about in the old Scientific American s but thought to be as extinct as those great reptiles buried in the deserts of the west. And at least a meter and a half wide, with tons of water in those buckets or troughs. He smiled at the thought of the little mills in his own country, buildings on stilts with the wheels flat in the water beneath and a simple vertical pole driving up into the belly of the mill to turn the stones. The wheels turned lazily in the river’s current, the flow catching the angled vanes on one side and overcoming the drag of the returning vanes on the other. Such a simple thing: a child could make one for his own amusement, and it was called a butterfly.
    But there was a man, Toma remembered, a kinsman of his father’s who lived half a day’s journey away on the road to the monastery nearest